As I was gearing my 8th graders up for their next novel, I realized that lots of the target structures I wanted to hit are already in Señor Wooly’s “Puedo ir a baño” video. If you are unfamiliar, it’s about a boy who barely arrives to Spanish class on time, only to immediately ask to go to the bathroom. (Not that any of our angels would dare to do such a thing!) So of course, he sings to his teacher about it.

I pulled out my target structures:

casi llega tarde

no puedo esperar

empieza a

no lo/la deja ir

And after asking the students who was a strict teacher, we came up with this:

It’s fun coming up with ways to impress the teacher. In another class, three different students were almost late and tried to impress the teacher. The first two failed, but we let the last one succeed because he both solved math problems AND twerked at the same time. Impressive!

After a few days of inventing and reading the story, they were ready to MovieTalk the video. I highly recommend a Señor Wooly subscription, but “Puedo ir al baño” is free!

My high school classes just finished reading the novel “Noches misteriosas en Granada” by Kristy Placido. I usually finish up a novel with some sort of group mural/speaking project. For this novel, though, I wanted to try something different.

Because it’s a mystery, there are a few big reveals in the last chapters. I summarized each one in a single sentence, and my students had to look through the novel for clues that hint at the larger mystery. It was a great way to have them go back to parts they remember and realize that little clues have been sprinkled throughout the whole book.